Thursday, July 27, 2006

Piper on Emergent

You'll find a link to a brief audio statement from John Piper on the Emergent Church at the new Desiring God National Conference Blog.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

in my opinion, the lack of any unifying ideas will prevent emergent churches from becoming any sort of a substantial movement. maybe the only thing that keeps them together at all is a distrust of old ideas, but that will only result in different, splintered, individualistic groups with no coherent doctrine.

the people who really "get" emergent don't care, though. they don't want to be a movement, they just want to flounder in their own exploration. everyone is welcome because there are no bad ideas except the old ones.

Ben said...

billy bob,

I think you're largely right, but the anti-theological ideas will have their effect, even if the movement is amorphous.

What is more interesting to me right now is the "Missional" category. At least a couple of the speakers--Driscoll and Keller--fit in that category, even though they're also occasionally classified with Emerging.

I don't perceive Driscoll and Keller to be theological reductionists, and they are critical of old ideas that are 1) cultural norms, not biblical absolutes, and 2) ineffective strategies for communicating the gospel to a 21st century audience.